Dear all,
Gosh it’s been a while hasn’t it? I do hope you are all very well. I’ve been hard at it in my ‘new normal’ of work life! You may have noticed that the days of me doing 250 gigs a year all over the world are not quite so anymore. As much as performing is my enduring passion it was always my intention to slightly flip the balance of my worklife from gigging the vast majority of the time and doing a little bit of teaching at home to being a bit more home-based. I do however freely admit that covid accelerated this rather dramatically!
Nevertheless, I’m enjoying the way things are. I now teach a lot and it’s more or less my bread and butter income but in addition to this I also run my Patreon page of videos, tabs and performances online, do recording session work at home and write banjo arrangements for folks! And of course I do still perform, I mean how could I not?! It still runs through me and I’ve so enjoyed the steady stream of gigs I still have.
And of course I’m a recording artist and I’m happy to say there is a new album on the way. I’ve been so pleased with success of my book ‘O’Neill’s Tunes For Clawhammer Banjo’ and buoyed by this I’ve decided to get the tunes recorded. Working with my long suffering record producer Mark Hutchinson, we’ll be recording medleys of the tunes with my own guitar accompaniments. I might even scatter a bit of bodhran somewhere too! Here’s a little video snippet for you as a preview, taken by Mark at the studio on Monday 🙂